


Mysteries of Love in Space

by IfYouSeeKayU



Category: Green Lantern (Comics), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alien Culture, Aliens, F/F, F/M, Infrequent Updates, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 11:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20062996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IfYouSeeKayU/pseuds/IfYouSeeKayU
Summary: Tales of love from across the universe.





	Mysteries of Love in Space

**Author's Note:**

> Kind of a sorta spin-off to that Green Lantern thing I haven’t updated. Just wanted to put this out. Really short.

Across the barren landscape, the cloaked boy walks. To what end, he did not know. 

Perhaps there world something to do on this world, he muses. Perhaps in the distance, beyond this dune sea, there was civilization. Somewhere that credulous citizens could give him water and a warm meal. Soothing simples for the festering wound on his collar bone. It will heal regardless, his physiology guarantees it, but that does not mean he’s incapable of feeling pain. 

He sincerely wishes he was not nearly ripped apart after being sandwiched between the ship’s engine and the captain’s chair. Though if he was that fortunate, his ship would not have crashed.

As far as his knowledge went, this planet was lifeless. It had no name nor number to it, which made it much harder for Pax Optima to track him. It also put him in an increasingly complicated dilemma, given the lack of supplies and native resources. For now, there was nothing but the orange prisoner’s clothes on his back to give him solace.

He wonders if some higher being had put a curse of death on him. It would not be surprising, he had set fire to many a church in his time. One of those deities had to have been real. And if that was the case, then he had probably ended up in Hell.

Across the barren landscape, the cloaked boy walks. With each laborious step, hope stretches thin. Rage, he learns, is a far more efficient fuel.

~w~

Eventually, night comes. The sand is painted silver by the moonlight, and his wounds have healed, albeit painfully. The winds become whispers that tell him of his imminent doom, and the air grows cooler.

Eventually, sets up ‘camp’ on the tallest dune he can find, hoping he’ll spot something. Whether it’s water or some animal to feast on. The latter is the preferred find. The food on Prison Planet were made to make sure that the inmates would grow hungry rather quickly after finishing their meal. It was a good strategy in theory; it kept morale low and the inmates weak. If any of them went running off the guards could subdue them quite easily.

Not him, however. Never him.

Eventually, he chooses to sleep. He fashions the cloak he wore into a makeshift pillow, revealing the alabaster color of his skin to the dead world and letting his bleach blonde hair flow in the gale that swept sand into his eyes. The stars are too visible in the sky for his liking. 

Eventually, he wakes up, and hears a sound. Many sounds. The sounds of music and footsteps. 

But the music has a chill to it, the petering sound that comes from a dying animal. The sound of an instrument he does not recognizes dies down in increments, before rising again. 

And the footsteps, too many for him to feel safe.

He stands, cloak held tight in his fist, and tries to peer over the horizon; where the music was coming from. 

He sees them, finally. The ruinous black shapes that seemed to writhe in abject fury at the very idea of life. The things that sang a song of a thousand dead worlds just like this one. He could make out no detail in the million faces that seemed to stare right back at him, only shapes that twisted and bent in a farrago of horror with a promise of death.

And as this horror from the depths of some warped God’s imagination came closer, he realized that he could see nothing beyond it. It was as if it erased the world and took its place.

It was at moments like these when a boy’s mettle was tested. When he was faced with some great challenge and asked if he would rise to it. To prove to himself that he could be a man in a world that would challenge him ceaselessly.

It was at moments like these when a boy’s mettle was tested. And it was. As was his sprinting speed as he ran in the opposite direction of the death horde.

As any smart boy would.

But his efforts were futile. The horde’s speed increases with his, and before he knows it he feels the collective maw of the creatures snap at his heels like a cur. And the music, it plays on and on like the booming sounds of an explosion; an unending cacophony that came from an abyss he has not the strength to look into. 

Then a new sound is heard beneath the orchestra of doom. A voice, gentle but firm. Like the last star in the sky, too stubborn to disappear in the void.

The voice said, “Ph’torrelzz!”

He hasn’t a clue what that means.

Quickly, a hand came from the sand beneath his feet, dainty and girlish. Thin fingers wrap around his ankle and pull him with incredible force, and soon he feels every orifice on his body fill with sand that muffles the sounds of a billion footsteps above the surface.

And so, the creatures that wandered across the benighted world ceased their songs and shrieking. 

And waited.

~w~

A curious thing, the seemingly unconscious boy was. The cloaked girl had never seen someone so unnaturally pale, even in all the years they’d been living in the Low. Her family’s infrequent trips to the surface helped give them color that only lasted so long, but it was enough to keep them healthy.

His eyes were strange too. Totally red, glowing conjunctiva with a tiny white pinpoint one wouldn’t even notice if they weren’t looking for it. Diamond-shaped black marks seemed painted over his face around both of his eyes, but upon inspection it seemed it was not paint at all. Even when she’d seen the Green Men all those years ago, with their strange appearances and imperatives they could never hope to understand; those creatures were too unorthodox to even consider real. 

This one, though, was too similar to her own race. Which, ironically enough, made looking at him an even more surreal experience. He even seems about as young as she is. 

“Are you alive?” She inquires, voice as soothing as she can make it. 

“No.” The boy replies, the harsh timbre of his pained voice cutting through the dark. “I sure don’t fraggin’ feel like it.”

She laughs at that. At least this strange visitor had jokes, if nothing else.

“That’s good! I was afraid you might’ve suffocated coming down. It’s a long way, not sure how well you, uh… whatever you are’s can handle it.”

The boy finally opens his eyes and looks straight into hers.

Or rather, what he assumed to be eyes. But the soft glow of those rosy pink pads on her cheeks made him realize that the pads themselves were not eyes at all.

“What were those things?” He barks out venomously, weakly sitting up on his forearms. There’s a look in his eyes like he’s going to hurt her if she doesn’t answer his question. The girl doesn’t falter, however; she has stared into the face of the vacuous monsters that walked the surface of what was once her home and lived to tell of it. This spaceman would not intimidate her as she’s sure he has many before.

Not her, however. Never her.

“That,” she stands from we crouched state beside him, looking down upon him as is trying to establish dominance, “was the Horde.”

He stands up after her, taking in his surroundings. It seems they’d found themselves in a tunnel of sorts, it’s concave and erratically sculpted walls creating a space too small for more than two people to stand in. The only light that kept the walkway lit were those coming from the eyes and cheeks of its two occupants. The temperature was cold and the air was thin, almost like standing on a mountain that went high above the clouds. 

The boy stands a few inches and some above the girl, but with his own slumped posture and the way she carried herself as strong and stalwart as a soldier, it was harder to tell.

“And where are we?” He asks more calmly this time.

“The Low.”

“That is?”

“The place above the Deep.”

“Very fraggin’ original with the names, girly.”

She giggles, finding his frustration amusing. “I see you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Lil’ obvious.” He deadpans, unimpressed. He would be more articulate with his words if he could, but his mind remains in that liminal space between the intense high of a near-death experience and the almost blissful feeling of safety that comes after it’s been classified as a near-death.

“C’mon, you must be tired. We’ve got food and water back at the Home.” He gives him an ear-to-ear grin before pivoting on her heel, setting off for the place she spoke of. 

He set off behind her, of course. After a few minutes of walking in amicable silence, she finally asks his name.

“Katsuki.” He answered.

“Ochako.” She returned the favor.

“I didn’t ask for your name.”

She rolls her eyes at that.

They walk for a little more, and the silence grows thicker with every step that echoed through the tunnel.

“So what happened to this place? Why’re you bastiches hiding underground like some sortsa’ worms?” He asks, the question delivered more succinctly than those beforehand. 

And she tells him.

She tells him of the once bustling plazas and promenades that thrived with business and trade. And little people who lived and loved in the verdant forests that stretched from one end of the planet to another. The days when the sun say beautifully on the horizon, visible from the sandy beaches where droplets of fresh water graced the faces of children and elders alike. When her people would take to the skies with their gravity harnesses removed and split the clouds into beautiful works of art. When they would take to the High, play their aeronautic games with the great beautiful winged beasts that came from the Beyond. Before her people wore bedraggled garbs and shielded their eyes from the sunlight. Before the world died.

“It was three years ago,” she continued, her expression hardening, “the north country’s science council would have warned us. They hoped they could call the Green Men before it was too late, but the Horde being there it… it made communications weaker. We couldn’t reach anyone. We couldn’t call for help.”

“So you lily-livered bastiches crawled into your holes then?”

She stops abruptly, turning and fixing him with a hard glare. No words, only the cold brown eyes of a girl who had seen too much for her age.

They move on through the dark.

~w~

They arrive at Home. This large, cavernous space that many of its inhabitants believed would be their tomb.

It’s not a particularly welcoming place. There’s an ever-present miasma of rotten meat and filth. Sickly adults and emaciated children walk through the stone walkways, staring at the newcomer with wide eyes. Each of their cheeks possess the same glowing pads that Ochako’s do, only in different colors. Some blue, green and even shades of yellow or red. Very few of them even have two different colors, one on each cheek. 

Instead of structures, they had opted to simply carve out holes in the walls. Some were so high up Katsuki figured they would need to climb at risk of their own fragile lives.

“It’s our gravity harnesses.” Ochako says, breaking him from his stupor, having noticed him staring at the highest of the hole-homes. “They keep us on the ground. We’re uhm—floaty.” At this, she opens her cloak and lets him take a peak at the silver contraption. “Sometimes—back then our people used to float in our sleep. We can control it without them, but it’s dangerous. Especially here, now. We wouldn’t want to accidentally leave the Low.”

Katsuki can agree. He wouldn’t want to go back to the surface either.

“So where’re we going now?” Katsuki asks, eyes darting left to right dangerously. There’s a mild discomfort in having a gaggle of weaklings gawking at him like a zoo animal.

“We’re going to be talking to the High Didactics to get you situated here. For now just shut up and rest till we can figure out what to do with you ugly butt.”

He growls in mild agitation, but makes no other attempt at rebuking her. After all, he could use some food and rest.

~w~

As it turned out, the food was quite awful.

This was something Katsuki had only learned after waiting a downright unfair amount of time standing outside of a particularly large hole while a bunch of old people stared at him while whispering amongst each other and with Ochako. Eventually, a few of them nodded and he was apparently to be given necessary asylum until he, and hopefully they could figure out a way off of this rock. For now, he would live, eat and rest inside of Ochako’s tiny home-hole. 

But the food? This sickening red jelly they’d prepared for him in a tiny stone bowl? It was the most harrowingly unpalatable thing he’d ever had the displeasure of putting in his mouth.

“Don’t be a baby.” Ochako chastised, taking a sip of her own horror jelly. “It’s not the best tasting, but the science council made it to keep us strong. It has everything you need—”

“Everything I need to fraggin’ keel over! This is shameful!”

“Just eat it. It’ll provide all the necessary—”

“Whoop-de-fraggin’-do!” He coughed and sputtered as he spoke, desperately drinking down the bowl of water she’d provided him. 

There’s a silence between the two of them yet again. Ochako continues sipping the red fluid earnestly while Katsuki crosses his arms with complete refusal.

“I’m gettin’ off this stankin’ fraggin’ rock. I’m leaving all this stuff behind me and going back to what I was gonna do.”

“And what were you _gonna do_before you got unlucky enough to land here?”

“What I’ve been doing.”

“And what’s that?”

Katsuki realizes he may destroy any chances of him being kept around if he admits to it.

So he lies.

“Traveling.”

As any smart boy would.

“You said they came from the ‘Beyond’ right? Bet it was that fraggin’ horde took my ship down. Swear I’ll turn it to dust once I come back with artillery for that. Hey, maybe you geeks’ll laud me as a hero.” He joked, but Ochako saw no humor in it.

“The Horde is everlasting.” She says, curt and honest.

“And what’s that supposed to mean.” He quirks an eyebrow at the statement.

“It’s what the north country’s science council said to us over transmission. It was the last we heard of them before the Horde took them.”

She sips the jelly again, this time letting the statement soak in for a moment.

Suddenly, a sinister grin; one that very nearly puts any kind of fear in her heart for this stranger from another world.

“Everlasting huh? We’ll fraggin’ see about that.” 

And despite the tone full of malice and the look of a killer who enjoys it, the statement almost makes the girl feel hope again.


End file.
